cameron. parker.

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Calling “hero” everyone killed in war, no matter the circumstances of their death, not only helps sustain the ethos of martial glory that keeps young men and women signing up to kill and die for the state, no matter the justice of the cause, but also saps the word of meaning, dishonouring the men and women of exceptional courage and valour actually worthy of the title. The cheapening of “hero” is a symptom of a culture desperate to evade serious moral self-reflection by covering itself in indiscriminate glory for undertaking wars of dubious value.

Now, it happens that I too believe in obvious moral bright lines, and as part of a fallen species I could never say that I can maintain mine. And yet I find that they have a simplicity that makes it far easier for me to police them. Don’t kill. Do everything possible to avoid war. Never suppose that killing is necessary. Never suppose that such a necessity could excuse such killing. Don’t imagine that any killing could ever be simplistically justified. Never celebrate death, under any circumstances. These rules are very difficult to live by, but no more so than Serwer’s, and unlike with his it is very easy to know when they have been violated.

Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends. Eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.